The good news was that our Claremore station (KC5SHE) was able to get his soundcard interface to work with his radio. The bad news is our 0.5 watt operator (KD5NJR) was unable to participate because of commitments to his church that evening.
We proceeded with testing at the higher 5 watt power level. PSK-250 was easy to copy. Both signal strengths were reading S9 at the end points (28 miles apart). S/N ratio according to the FLDIGI software was 28-30 db. I have been able to decode below 5 db on S/N ratio, but that usually with somewhere between 20-30% bad characters. From 10 db on upwards, copy is very good and only the occasional character may get lost. So the testing indicates we are a good 18 db above a reasonable cutoff point.
It is worth noting that the testing was conducted the evening after a fairly significant solar storm, so band conditions were fairly unfavorable.
Hopefully we will have additional lower power test data to share over the next few days from KD5NJR for comparison purposes.
All in all, this continues to validate the concept of using groundwave/NVIS on 30m or 40m to establish a network of PSK nodes, with minimal power required at each.
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